The Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) has postponed all medical examinations that had been scheduled for January 2021.
It barred medical universities from holding examinations due to the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic via a notification issued on Thursday.
This is the second time in two months that examinations have been postponed. On 26 November 2020, the federal government had closed educational institutes for one and a half months due to the pandemic. Consequently, all the examinations that had been scheduled for December 2020 had been deferred to 10 JanuarHowever, it was decided in a recent meeting chaired by the NHS Secretary, Aamir Ashraf Khawaja, to further delay all medical professional examinations until February 2021.
Concurrently, medical students have been demanding immediate promotions to the next academic semester. They argue that they should be promoted in a manner similar to that of the students of the primary and secondary schools.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the NHS, Sajid Shah, said that a meeting of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) that was attended by stakeholders, had concluded to not hold examinations in January.
Over the last one week, we received thousands of calls as some of the universities had announced the dates of examinations in January despite the fact that they were closed until the end of the current month.
Shah revealed that it had also been decided in the meeting that students seeking professional degrees could not be promoted without examinations, that the examinations would be held after 1 February, and that all the universities would be duly notified about the decisions.
